Internet of Things (IoT) is more and more widely used in the next generation of mobile communication networks. A traffic of IoT has many new features, including extra low power consumption requirement, deployment of massive user equipments (UEs), relatively less flow of data, and low requirement on traffic latency, etc. Such features pose many technical requirements to an LTE (Long Term Evolution) system, in which an important requirement includes supporting massive UEs.
A new wireless communication technology for supporting IoT traffics, i.e. a subject of a technology of narrow band Internet of Things (NB-IoT), is under study in the 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP).
The NB-IoT technology is a new narrow band communication technology based on the existing LTE technology and further enhanced to satisfy IoT traffic demands. A physical layer technology of the NB-IoT is based on a wireless bandwidth of 200 kHZ. Relative to a legacy LTE system, frequency domain resources that may be used by the UE are outstandingly reduced. Although such a design may efficiently lower complexity of the UE, it makes effective data that can be transmitted by the UE in each subframe become less. In general cases, the amount of data traffic of each NB-IoT UE is relatively small, and the demand for radio resources is not large. Hence, such a design is reasonable.
And on the other hand, in a paging scheme of an LTE system, a UE calculates a paging occasion (PO) of itself according to a parameter configured by a network device. When data traffic has arrived at a certain UE, a mobility management entity (MME) transmits a paging message to a base station (such as an eNB), and the base station transmits a paging message within a PO of the UE. For example, the paging message is carried by a physical downlink shared channel (PDSCH) indicated by downlink control information (DCI) in a physical downlink control channel (PDCCH).
After the UE decodes the paging message on the PDSCH, if a user identity (or may be referred to as UE identity) contained in the paging message is identical to that of the UE itself, it shows that the UE is paged, and a connection establishment request should be initiated. The user identity in the paging message may be an international mobile subscriber identification (IMSI) or may be a temporary mobile subscriber identity (S-TMSI). Each paged UE is denoted by a user identity record, and user identities of multiple paged UEs constitute a paging message, which is carried on a PDSCH.
It should be noted that the above description of the background is merely provided for clear and complete explanation of this disclosure and for easy understanding by those skilled in the art. And it should not be understood that the above technical solution is known to those skilled in the art as it is described in the background of this disclosure.